Hey there!
I have SUCH a great design sprint hack and I’m kinda shocked that I didn’t already put it in the newsletter—I guess I was distracted by spamming you with
Make Time promos. Anyway, here it is, along with some other good stuff:
This is a technique for speeding up and simplifying the map-making on day 1 of the design sprint.
Stéph Cruchon came up with it and jeez, I WISH it’d been me… it’s so smart. Anyway, I now teach this method in my workshops and use it in my own sprints. This post (by Stéph… not me) is a great how-to guide and includes a step-by-step video.
Cool story from
Léa Mendes Da Silva about how she rebranded a startup by herself under a tight timeline. Most rebrand stories are glossy productions by big companies, and they’re cool… but this is so much cooler. (Léa included the
Three-Hour Brand Sprint in her process, which is also rad!)
If you’ve got an Apple TV, check out this app from Norwegian agency
Itch Design—it’s a tool to help guide a design sprint, built for tvOS. Don’t worry if you don’t speak Norwegian; Itch assures me the app works in English.
If you love geeky details (yes, please!) and you’re hiring people (errr… not me, but I’m so into geeky details it doesn’t matter) then you might enjoy this extremely thoughtful and analytic approach to hiring from Figma.
Speaking of Figma, this
talk by
Marcin Wichary (a designer at Figma) is one of the most delightful I’ve ever seen. Marcin doesn’t use Keynote or Powerpoint… he actually writes code for his slides, which are beautiful, clear, and even interactive! He’s also an amazing storyteller. (Bonus link: Sign up for Marcin’s fantastic
newsletter—he’s writing a book about keyboards and sharing stories and photos as he goes.)
A few months back I wrote a post about why, if you’re a designer, you should should
build your portfolio around one awesome story. Then the folks at
UX folio emailed me, because they have a website with templates for story-based portfolios. I checked it out and it does look pretty good. I mean, if you’re a designer, you really should make your portfolio from scratch (even if “from scratch” means “with Squarespace”) but if you can’t for some reason, UX folio is worth a look.
Aw jeez, this newsletter is pretty long! Well I suppose it’s an experiment. Let me know what you think… less frequent and longer? More frequent and shorter? Unsubscribe? Haha no please don’t.